Paladin (Graven Gods 1) Read Online Free Page A

a gun.
    Paladin threw up a hand to shield, sending the bullet ricocheting. He smacked the weapon out of Moss’s hand and buried a fist in his gut. When Moss bent, gagging, Paladin grabbed the back of his head and jerked it down to meet the knee he rammed up into it. Cartilage crunched, blood flew, and Moss shrieked a nasal curse. He staggered back, hand cupped over his broken nose. “Mothafucka!”
    “That’s just an appetizer, asshole. You’re not going to kill any more women in my town.” Pitiful bodies littered his memory, leaking psychic impressions of pain on dirty pavement or bloody floors.
    The cops had taken away the bodies, but the victims’ anguish had burned Paladin’s fingers when he’d touched the places they’d died. His head rang with their ghostly cries for justice. They had been strippers, hookers, and addicts. But also mothers, daughters, sisters and friends. And no one deserved what had been done to them.
    The scales had to balance or there was only chaos.
    Paladin grabbed Moss’s throat and slammed him against the strip club wall. The killer’s fingers started to burn blue, but Paladin clamped a hand over his hard enough to crush bone. Moss howled in pain as his palm went dark again.
    Paladin’s lips curled off his teeth. He had the bastard now, and there was only one way this was going to end. His tatts glowed, pumping magic into the fingers wrapped around his foe’s throat. The spell shot into Moss’s brain, seeking out a ball of magic brilliant with the life force he’d stolen from his victims. Snaking black streams of parasitic magic wrapped around that energy: the spell Valak had planted to collect it.
    When Paladin’s probe touched the energy, the spell struck at him like a rattlesnake. Grimly, he peeled the dark magical strands away from the captive life force. As Paladin tore it apart, Moss shrieked, bucking in his grip.
    “Cry a river, motherfucker,” Paladin snarled, and kept ripping. With each tendril he shredded, he freed another kidnapped spirit to stream into his keeping.
    Unfortunately, he paid for that magical contact with the killer’s brain. Foul memories of rapes and murders battered his consciousness, images of Moss’s crimes that made him shudder in revulsion.
    Ignore it. Concentrate on the job .
    He had to rescue every shred of innocence. If he left any of it behind, Valak could drink it from Moss’s corpse.
    The last wisp of light streamed into Paladin’s flesh. He peeled his aching fingers from the killer’s throat, and Moss hit the ground, lifeless. An autopsy would show only that he’d died from a stopped heart; the beating he’d suffered at Paladin’s hands hadn’t been bad enough to kill him.
    But when the cops checked the cell phone in the dead man’s pocket, Paladin knew they’d find the photos Moss had taken of his victims before and after death. Including the picture of Jamella Brown, whose daughter, Chantel, had hired Paladin with her birthday money.
    Paladin climbed to his feet, feeling battered. His stomach twisted with nausea as his brain seemed to shudder in his skull. The foul magic he’d absorbed from the killer poisoned his soul. He’d need to pour it into a storage gem until he could find someone to cleanse it. But there was no time to worry about that now; he had one last duty to perform.
    Spreading his big, scarred hands, Paladin closed his eyes, murmured a prayer, and released the spirits of the murdered women back into the care of the All. With psychic cries of gratitude, they poured into the light.
    He let his hands fall and slumped, opening his eyes.
    Gerald Moss’s last victim stared at him, pale and shaking. One of her eyes was wide with terror, the other swollen shut. Her scraped, shaking hands shielded her bruised face. “Don’t hurt me! Please… I won’t tell anybody! Just… Just don’t hurt me!”
    Paladin grimaced, realizing she’d been too close. She’d experienced the magical backwash of Moss’s punishment, and